God knows I should not have hesitated, at your command, to precede or to follow you to hell itself!

It was his distrust that cut her to the heart.  Still, her love for him was so intense that she obeyed his order.  Soon after she took the vows; and in the convent chapel, shaken with sobs, she knelt before the altar and assumed the veil of a cloistered nun.  Abelard himself put on the black tunic of a Benedictine monk and entered the Abbey of St. Denis.

It is unnecessary here to follow out all the details of the lives of Abelard and Heloise after this heart-rendering scene.  Abelard passed through many years of strife and disappointment, and even of humiliation; for on one occasion, just as he had silenced Guillaume de Champeaux, so he himself was silenced and put to rout by Bernard of Clairvaux—­“a frail, tense, absorbed, dominant little man, whose face was white and worn with suffering,” but in whose eyes there was a light of supreme strength.  Bernard represented pure faith, as Abelard represented pure reason; and the two men met before a great council to match their respective powers.

Bernard, with fiery eloquence, brought a charge of heresy against Abelard in an oration which was like a charge of cavalry.  When he had concluded Abelard rose with an ashen face, stammered out a few words, and sat down.  He was condemned by the council, and his works were ordered to be burned.

All his later life was one of misfortune, of humiliation, and even of personal danger.  The reckless monks whom he tried to rule rose fiercely against him.  His life was threatened.  He betook himself to a desolate and lonely place, where he built for himself a hut of reeds and rushes, hoping to spend his final years in meditation.  But there were many who had not forgotten his ability as a teacher.  These flocked by hundreds to the desert place where he abode.  His hut was surrounded by tents and rude hovels, built by his scholars for their shelter.

Thus Abelard resumed his teaching, though in a very different frame of mind.  In time he built a structure of wood and stone, which he called the Paraclete, some remains of which can still be seen.

All this time no word had passed between him and Heloise.  But presently Abelard wrote and gave to the world a curious and exceedingly frank book, which he called The Story of My Misfortunes.  A copy of it reached the hands of Heloise, and she at once sent to Abelard the first of a series of letters which have remained unique in the literature of love.

Ten years had passed, and yet the woman’s heart was as faithful and as full of yearning as on the day when the two had parted.  It has been said that the letters are not genuine, and they must be read with this assertion in mind; yet it is difficult to believe that any one save Heloise herself could have flung a human soul into such frankly passionate utterances, or that any imitator could have done the work.